Yearly Archives: 2006

Are The Queens Cooperating?

This entry was posted in Entymology on by

Or is some other factor leading to the large number of multiple queen yellow jacket nests in Alabama this year:

Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he’s aware of about 16 of what he described as “super-sized” nests in south Alabama.
….
In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.
Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February — and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.
….
He said the “super colonies” appear to have many queens.
“We’re not really sure how this multiple queen thing works,” Ray said. “It could be that the daughters of the original queen don’t leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate.”

The over winter survival probably contibutes heavily to the large size allowing a longer egg laying season. The multiple queen thing though is interesting. Are they really cooperating? Why didn’t the new queens move on to form their own nests? What makes these large nests a superior survival mechanism? What if there are a series of years without a die off?
Perhaps even more interesting is this:

Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists.

It is probably consistent that some food was avaiilable through the warmer winter. However, where did enough food to sustain a colony 30 times normal size come from? Is something dying off more than normal? Are they preparing for even larger feasts in the future?
Yellow Jacket Fact Sheet
Eastern Yellow Jacket Vespula maculifrons (the above article did not indicate if Easterns are the big colony builders):
EasternYellowJacket.jpg

Via boingboing.

Causus Toss’m Out

This entry was posted in Anarchism Drug Laws Government Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

There are reason’s a plenty to toss out the current us federal office holders, all of them, and most of the domestic reasons get lost behind the bloody headlines of democracy’s international warfare.
Radley Balko at The Agitator provides near daily, oft multiple times a day, examples of federal, state and local government representatives abusing individuals, families and associations of individuals.
Asset forfeiture llegislation is a particularly heinous weapon in the government arsonal of extortion and theft tools and today Balko highlites a particularly onerous use of asset forfeiture:

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that police may keep the $124,700 they seized from Emiliano Gonzolez, an immigrant who by all appearances was attempting to use the money to start a legitimate business.
This is an outrageous ruling. Consider:
# Gonzolez was never charged with any crime in relation to the money, much less convicted.
# Gonzalez had an explanation for the money that a lower court found both “plausible” and “consistent.” He brought several witnesses forward to corroborate his story (in the preposterous land of asset forfeiture, property can be guilty of a crime, and the burden is often person the police seized the property from to prove he obtained it legally).
# The government offered no evidence to counter Gonzolez’s explanation.
Instead, the court ruled that the mere fact that Gonzolez was carrying a large sum of money, that he had difficulty understanding the officer’s questions, that he incorrectly answered some of those questions (due, Gonzolez says, to fears that if police knew he was carrying that much money, they might confiscate it — imagine that!), and that a drug dog alerted to the car Gonzolez was driving (which, as dissenting judge Donald Lay noted, was a rental, likely driven by dozens of people before Gonzolez), was enough to “convict” the money of having drug ties, even if there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Gonzolez.

Read the rest of the post and Balko has the link to the opinion.

Yep, part and parcel of the immoral war on drugs which is itself plenty of reason to convict every participant of crimes against humanity.